Return to Southern Iowa GH4

I returned to Appanoose County Iowa with Nick Young of Cairn Productions. This time with a few changes to settings of my GH4 compared to the last video.
Cinelike-D does have the most dynamic range of all the cameras profiles, and it's default contrast of 0 is actually just right for most situations.
I increased saturation to +1 because I know Nick likes to push saturation in post, so I figured I'd give it to him up front.
I also set the Noise Reduction to 0 instead of the commonly used -5. If the resolution takes a hit because of this, I can't see it. And I do notice much better results in low light with the NR at this setting.

Master Ped is at 0 and iDynamic and all that unnecessary stuff is set to Off. I feel very strongly that the trend of lifting Master Ped to +10 or +15 is destroying the GH4's image. Likewise with using iDynamic with anything other than 200 ISO.

The last thing I want to mention is about zebras. I am so thankful for the Gh4's zebras for setting exposure. Back in the day, every prosumer and professional camera had zebras as an exposure tool, but when the DSLR revolution happened, those went away and nailing exposure became more difficult. Now zebras are back and and it's a joyful reunion.

I set Zebra 1 to 95% (and this is with the GH4 Luminance set to 0-255 which has a range of 0-109% brightness). Therefore, I have about 15% headroom before clipping on areas that ping the zebras. I set Zebra 2 to 60% for skin tones and, with Cinlike-D which sets middle gray 2/3 stop lower than the other profiles, I want only the highlights of skin tones to ping this. Many GH4 users are overexposing their image by using the outdated philosophy that 70% is where skin tones live. Trust me. Set your skin tones lower and you will find your GH4 footage improve dramatically. No more clipping of the red channel.